SOURCE: Hutcheon, Linda. “Metafictional Implications for Novelistic Reference.” On Referring in Literature, edited by Anna Whiteside and Michael Issacharoff, pp. 1-13. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Hutcheon traces the implications of metafiction on the literary genre of the novel.

The critical acceptance, not to say canonization, of contemporary metafiction—postmodernist, neobaroque,¹ or whatever it is eventually to be named—has led to a rethinking of many of the traditional assumptions about the novel as a mimetic genre. In other words, the actual forms of the fictions themselves have brought about a challenging of the theories that purport to explain them. For example, a self-reflexive form of fiction, one which in effect constitutes its own first critical commentary, has disturbing implications for concepts of novelistic reference. While the realist novel of the last century has usually provided the data base from which Marxist theories of reference...